All A Matter of Taste

There is an old Latin saying that goes “de gustibus non est disputandum”. Its meaning would be rendered in English by “there is no arguing about taste.” It is not a descriptive statement about the way people behave. If it were it would be palpable nonsense. People argue about taste all the time:

“You put ketchup on your toast?”
“How can you stand listening to that kind of music?”
”She has horrible taste in men!”

You hear variations of these questions and statements every day. Taste is one of the things people are most likely to disagree about and argue over.

The purpose of the Latin saying, is not to deny this reality but to declare that arguments of this nature are pointless. Taste is personal and subjective. People like what they like and dislike what they dislike and you are not going to argue them into changing their likes and dislikes.

The saying and the perspective on taste which it expresses have been around for quite some time. We do not know who coined the Latin expression although it is usually believed to date back to the late Middle Ages.

Is the saying true?

It is more important today than ever before that we ask that question. For the idea that everything in the realm of taste lies beyond the realm of that which can be legitimately judged and criticized by others has come to be a very powerful idea. As that notion has become more widely accepted, more and more elements of our everyday existence, particularly those which are considered to belong to “culture”, have been relegated to the realm of taste.

The first step in determining whether or not it is in fact true that taste is entirely subjective and not a matter for legitimate criticism is to distinguish between the different ways in which we speak of taste. We will consider three basic senses to the word taste, the first two of which are closely related to each other and could be spoken of as “literal” taste, the third of which is a metaphorical extension of the meaning of the second.

In the first and most basic sense we use the word taste to refer to a physical sense in which information is collected by the body and carried to the brain. This is the taste which is akin to sight, hearing, smell and touch. Located in the tongue it tells the brain whether food is sweet or salty, spicy or bland, sour or bitter.

After this information passes from the tongue to the brain, our mind processes it and passes judgement on whether or not we like the food. As we experience different flavours, patterns form in how we evaluate them. We develop preferences for foods which taste a certain way and aversions to others. These patterns of preferences we also refer to as tastes.

It is not only the information that we receive from our taste buds that we evaluate and form likes and dislikes over. We do the same with information we receive from our eyes and ears. We look to the east as the sun is setting, see the various shades of red, yellow, and orange that form in the sky, and liking what we see, we call it beautiful. Conversely, we walk along the sidewalk and all of a sudden a car comes racing down the street at highway speeds, swerves out of control and hits a hydro pole, and the driver is propelled through the windshield. The sight of his mangled, bloody, carcass repels us, and we use words like ugly, gruesome, and hideous to describe it. We like the sound of the birds singing in the tree outside our window. We dislike the sound of fingernails drawn across a chalkboard.

While we generally don’t think of our reaction to those types of sights and sounds as tastes we do consider our evaluation of sights and sounds which are the products of human creativity to be tastes. We look at Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the Reims Cathedral and the Venus de Milo and, taken away by their beauty, we pronounce them to be among the greatest achievements of man’s creativity in the history of the world. Or we listen to J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”, W. A. Mozart’s Mass No. 17 in C-Minor, “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” from Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria and make a similar evaluation of the acoustical beauty of these masterpieces.

Then again we might look at Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista and be sickened, be angered by the emptiness of the void which is John Cage’s 4’33", or be absolutely appalled at the way self-indulgent, self-destructive hedonism is celebrated in lyrics sung to computer-generated formulaic tunes in the latest hits by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga or Ke$ha.

All of these are tastes.

This final, extended sense of the word taste is quite broad and covers more than just the way we think about visual art and music. It also includes our likes and dislikes when it comes to literature and theatre, and more recently television and the movies.

It is important that we recognize that these different meanings of the word taste are related to each other. Why do we describe our likes and dislikes with regards to movies, music, and books as “tastes”? We do so because they are judgements which are of a similar nature to those we form about our food. Some people develop a preference for sweet flavours over salty ones, others develop the opposite preference. Similarly some people prefer romantic comedies over spy thrillers while it is the other way around for others. The concept of taste in matters of culture is derived from the concept of taste with regards to food.

What does this tell us about the question of the subjectivity of taste?

Note that while our tastes in food are undoubtedly subjective they are based upon an objective element. When one person says “I like roast chicken with mashed potatoes” and another person responds with “I prefer fried chicken and potato salad” both statements are subjective judgements. When, however, someone says “honey is sweet” and another person says “olives are salty” they are making statements which are objective.

Both sets of statements express something about taste. What makes the one set objective and the other subjective?

An objective statement attributes a quality to something which can be verified or falsified by other people. “Sugar is sweet” says something about sugar which we can all experience for ourselves by tasting it. Everybody experiences the taste of sugar as sweet unless there is something wrong with their taste buds.

A subjective statement, on the other hand, is a statement about how you experience something which other people cannot enter into, although they might have their own similar experiences. When you say “I like Brussels sprouts” no other person can test the truth of the statement because while someone else might eat Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not he likes them, he cannot enter into your experience of Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not you like them. Now you might grimace while eating Brussels sprouts giving us cause to doubt and question the veracity of what you say. In that case, however, we doubt because your testimony contradicts itself. Your facial expressions and your words are saying two different things. Your actual experience of Brussels sprouts we cannot directly evaluate – only your testimony as to that experience.

The cause of objective tastes – the salty taste of potato chips or the sweet taste in ice cream – is found in the foods themselves, which is why if our senses of taste are all functioning normally, we agree as to what those tastes are. The causes of subjective tastes – whether we like or dislike bologna sandwiches or whether we like them more or less than we like peanut butter sandwiches – are found within us. This is why taste in the sense of our hierarchy of likes and dislikes differs from person to person. People are different and their differences affect and are reflected in what they like and dislike.

Now if you like hot dogs loaded with sauerkraut, pickles, and hot peppers you are going to think other people should like them too. That is the very nature of liking something. When you say “I like spaghetti and meatballs” what you are saying is you have judged the experience of eating spaghetti and meatballs to be an agreeable experience. Ordinarily, when people find an experience to be agreeable they wish others to share it as well, and when they find an experience to be disagreeable they wish others to avoid it. It is true that we often hear people say “Ew, this is disgusting, here try it” but when people say this they are looking for confirmation of their own evaluation and expect the other person to agree with them.

There is nothing wrong with thinking that what you like other people ought to like as well and that what you dislike should be disliked by others. If we did not think this way, if our lists of what we like and dislike were completely separated from our judgements of what other people ought to like and dislike, we would be completely isolated from others. Communication and sharing, which are fundamental elements of the cooperation between human beings necessary for us to live together in communities and societies, would be virtually impossible if we did not have an expectation that other people would like the same things we like.

There are different ways in which we can draw expectations from our own tastes as to how other people will like or dislike certain things. Lets say that you really like banana milkshakes. From this you can conclude that other people will like them as well. You might, however, draw the conclusion that everybody will like them. The first conclusion is entirely reasonable and appropriate. The second conclusion is less justifiable because it cannot be drawn without losing sight of the fact that people differ from each other.

There is also the possibility of a third conclusion. The third conclusion is that because you like banana milkshakes other people ought to like them as well. If you draw this conclusion you do not make the same mistake as someone who would draw the second conclusion. You recognize that people are different and that not all people will like the same things. Your conclusion, however, is radically different from the first two conclusions because it is a judgement about what other people ought to like rather than whether or not they will like it.

If you draw the first and most reasonable conclusion you might be inspired to act upon it in a number of ways. You might go around telling your family and friends how good banana milkshakes are because you do not wish them to miss out on something you have enjoyed and which they might potentially enjoy as well. Or you might open a banana milkshake shop in the hopes of turning your conviction that others will also like what you enjoy yourself into a profitable venture. There is nothing wrong with behaving in either of these ways.

If you draw the third conclusion, however, you might decide to try and make people like what you think they ought to like. You would not succeed. The most you could accomplish by, for example, telling people that they must like banana milkshakes or you will club them over the head, is getting them to all say they like banana milkshakes when in your presence. That does not mean that they will actually like them and more likely than not your acting in this way will in fact turn people off of banana milkshakes.

It is unlikely that you would go to the extreme of using coercive force to try and make people like banana milkshakes. People form likes and dislikes, however, about a wide spectrum of different things and when their likes and dislikes clash with another person’s there is potential for disagreement to escalate into violence. It is for this reason that we encourage the quality of civility among people. Part of that quality, involves reflecting upon the fact that no two persons are exactly alike and that if members of a community are going to live together in peace, harmony, and cooperation they will have to allow each other to differ from themselves. Out of this, the idea enshrined in the Latin expression we have been considering, arose.

Just as, however, the reasonable expectation that others will like what I like can be taken to the unhealthy extreme of “others must like what I like”, so we can take the idea that taste is subjective too far. We can say that taste is entirely subjective and does not contain an objective element. We can say that the concepts of “should” or “ought” ought never to be applied to taste. In both cases we have taken the subjectivity of taste too far.

If taste were entirely subjective then the statement “vanilla ice cream may be sweet to you but to me it salty and spicy” would be a valid statement instead of blithering nonsense. “I like vanilla ice cream” is a subjective statement. “Vanilla ice cream is sweet” is not.

Now someone might say “yes, that is true of taste concerning food, but taste concerning art, literature, or music is different”.

That, however, is manifestly not true.

There are statements about our artistic and cultural tastes which are clearly subjective. One person might say “I like Paolo Uccello’s triptych on The Battle of San Romano” to which another person might respond “Well, I prefer Pablo Picasso’s Guernica”. Or someone might express admiration for Titian’s Venus of Urbino to another person who replies by stating his preference for Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. I like Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps. You, on the other hand, might like C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker series. These are all subjective statements because no matter who is making them, or which painting is preferred, they are all “I like” statements which are statements about the person doing the liking and not about the painting which is liked.

Yet these are obviously not the only kinds of statements which can be made about art. We can also objectively discuss the works of art themselves. Pages upon pages have been written about each of the paintings mentioned above which do just that. Nor, are the two kinds of statements unconnected with each other. If I say “I like strawberries” I am saying something about myself and if I say “strawberries are sweet” I am saying something about strawberries, but what I say about myself is partially derived from what I say about the strawberries, because the sweetness of the strawberries is one reason why I like them. Similarly, when I praise the religious theme, the use of colour, and the craftsmanship in the Ghent altarpiece painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck these form part of the reason why I like the piece.

Just as it is not true that there is no objective element to artistic and cultural taste neither is it the case that we should never speak of tastes in terms of “ought” or “should”. While taste should not be enforced with coercion it is proper for us to speak of things we ought to like and things we ought to dislike. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it is better for us to like certain things than to like other things.

Consider our tastes in food. One person prefers meals which are home-cooked and nutritionally balanced. Another person prefers to eat in the kind of restaurant where you sit down and wait while your meal is cooked and a server brings it to you. A third person gets most of his meals from burger joints, pizza parlours, fried chicken places and other fast food restaurants. Finally, a fourth person seems to survive entirely on a diet of potato chips, soda pop, and chocolate bars.

Can we say that each of these preferences is equal to the others and that none of them is a better taste than any of the others?

Of course not. The first person’s taste is the best and the second person’s taste is second best. While the third person’s taste is bad the fourth person’s is even worse.

What is the basis of this judgement?

A number of factors contribute to it. The quality of the food and the method of preparation is one factor. Fast food and junk food are mass produced to be sold cheaply in large quantities. Quality is always sacrificed when things are produced in this manner. The nutritional value and effects upon health are other factors. The flavour of the food is also a factor. While some might argue that this is part of the subjective element of taste the flavour of a home cooked meal tends to be far superior to that of junk food which relies upon sugar, salt, and various chemicals to produce its very limited range of flavours.

This does not mean that we should only ever eat home cooked meals or that we should pass a law saying that people must only ever eat home cooked meals. It means that the person who shows a persistent preference for home cooking has good taste while the person who shows a persistent preference for junk food has bad taste.

The same thing is true of cultural tastes. There is good taste and there is bad taste. Or, more accurately, there are various degrees of better and worse tastes.

What is it we are judging to be good or bad, or better or worse, when we classify tastes in this way?

It is our ability to properly distinguish between the good and the bad, or between the better and the worse. Our discernment in other words. It can also be the extent to which our personal likes and dislikes reflect our discernment.

Good taste in food is the ability to distinguish between food which is nutritious, delicious, fresh, and well prepared and food which is unhealthy, mass produced, and quickly prepared and to identify the former as being better than the latter. It is also a preference for the former over the latter. Bad taste in food can refer either to a lack of discernment about which foods are better than others or a pattern of preferring the worse foods over the better.

Good taste in culture is both the ability to rightly distinguish between what is good and bad in culture and a preference for the good over the bad.

Can good and bad, or better and worse, be distinguished in literature, music, and art?

Of course they can. Natural talent is not equally distributed among artists. Some artists are tremendously talented others have only a little talent. All other considerations being equal, the works of artists with more talent will be superior to the works of artists with less talent. But other considerations are not equal. Training also contributes to the quality of art. Some artists are apprenticed, others are trained in schools, and others are self-taught. These things make a difference. So does the amount of effort an artist puts into his work. One artist may painstakingly labour over every detail of his work while another slaps his paint onto the canvas with only a minimal attention to detail. All of these factors together contribute to the quality of art.

These are not the only criteria by which we can distinguish the good and the bad in culture. Just as some foods promote good health while others tend to be unhealthy so culture can have a good or a bad effect on us. Some literature, music, and art encourages us to worship our Creator and be thankful for His many blessings, inspires feelings of piety towards God, our family, and our country, and promotes virtuous behavior. Other literature, music, and art does the exact opposite of all of this.

Culture can be good in one sense and bad in the other. Literature and music can have an entirely wholesome message yet be uninspired, dull, and boring. Or it can be original and exciting and at the same time subversive and evil.

Culture can also be good in both senses. The masters of the High Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael – possessed inspiration and genius on top of talent, and constructed their masterpieces with precise attention to details, striving for perfection. Their works – such as The Creation of Adam, The Last Supper and The Transfiguration – are spiritually and morally uplifting.

Then there is culture which is bad in both senses. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe's pornographic photographs, Andres Serrano’s P*** Christ, and Damien Hirst’s pickled animals. These works are not aesthetically pleasing, they display neither talent nor genius, and they are spiritually and morally subversive.

There are, of course, many other distinctions which can be made between different works of music, literature, and art which are not matters of good or bad, or better or worse. This has to be kept in mind as does the fact that when we read a book, listen to a song, or look at a painting and decide “I like this” or “I don’t like this”, these decisions are about us as well as about the works of art themselves. The ability to distinguish between differences in art which can be expressed in terms of degrees of quality and differences which should not be expressed this way and to recognize the difference between an objective evaluation of art on the one hand and your subjective response to art on the other is itself an indication of good taste – the ability to distinguish and discriminate properly.

Good taste is not something we are born with but rather something we acquire. What kind of foods do children generally prefer? Cake, cookies, candy, ice cream, soda pop, potato chips, chocolate bars, hot dogs, hamburgers, and basically everything loaded with sugar or salt. What kind of foods are children most likely to squinch up their face and say “Ew, gross” over? Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and vegetables in general, especially the green ones. It is natural for children to have these preferences. There is something seriously wrong, however, with an adult whose tastes have not matured, who has not developed an appreciation for better foods than these, and who opts to make “fun” foods the staples of his diet.

Likewise, our capacity for appreciating the better elements of our culture is more limited when we are children and must grow and develop. We begin with nonsense rhymes and as we mature develop an appreciation for the sonnets of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. The music we like as children consists of songs with fun lyrics. As we mature we learn to like songs with more serious lyrics and instrumental pieces. Our attention span is quite short when we are children but it gets longer as we grow older allowing us to learn to appreciate longer music works like Mahler’s 8th or the operas in Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen.

The way in which our tastes change, expand, and hopefully improve as we get older is a vital part of the process of maturation, of growing up. The idea that taste is entirely subjective is no friend to this process and can be a hindrance to it. If one taste is just as good as another why should we learn to restrain our impulsive desire to eat nothing but cake and ice cream and learn to like those icky vegetables? If tastes are entirely subjective who are you to say that I should move on from Sesame Street to Shakespeare? If we stop distinguishing between the good and bad, or the better and the worse, we will have no conceptual framework within which to strive to improve ourselves and our tastes.

If our tastes fail to mature – if their growth is stunted somehow – then we will fail to develop good taste. There is also the possibility that our tastes will develop but in the wrong way. We may come to develop a preference for bad things over good things. Instead of learning to love Brahms’ concertos or Elgar’s marches we might develop a love for death metal or, perish the thought, gangsta rap. We might reject King Lear and Othello in favour of slasher films or “reality” TV. Of course these two ways in which taste can become bad – failing to mature or developing in the wrong way are not entirely distinct from each other. One of the most notable characteristics of contemporary North American pop culture – the very epitome of bad taste – is its immaturity. Not only is most of it now produced with a teenage target audience in mind, even that which is ostensibly produced for adults is primarily distinguished from the rest by obscenity, gratuitous violence, and profanity – all of which scream adolescence rather than maturity.

There is one final question that we need to consider. If everything I have argued above is true, if art, literature, music and other cultural works can be objectively evaluated and a hierarchy of better, good, bad, worse identified, and if our taste itself can be judged to be good or bad on the basis of our ability to properly discern the better and the worst in culture, why do so many people think otherwise?

The answer is that we live in an era in which people have become increasingly hostile to the idea that they should be held accountable to external standards. A cult has formed around the self which identifies self expression, self-discovery, self-esteem and self-worth as all-important positive values that we need to strive for. Restraint upon the self – such as that represented by external standards – is naturally rejected by this cult. This is all the more the case when the standards are applied to something like taste which does include a strong personal and subjective element.

This exaltation of self is an unhealthy development which has caused a reasonable principle to be taken too far. We should not judge a person’s “I like X” statements in the same way that we judge his “X is better than Y” statements. The two kinds of statements are completely different and are not subject to the same standards of right and wrong. If a person cannot properly distinguish between which is better, X or Y, this can reveal itself as a pattern in that person’s “I like X” statements, however. This is where the distinction between good and bad taste comes in. It cannot and should not be rejected in favour of pure subjectivity.

Things which Inspire Love and Awe

“A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” by Edmund Burke, pp. 7-140 in Edmund Burke (Harvard Classics Deluxe Edition) edited by Charles W. Eliot, New York, P. F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1909, 1937, 1969, 421 pages.


When you examine a well-illuminated, softly-coloured painting by an inspired master, walk through a well-tended flower garden in summer, admire a beautiful woman, take a drive in the country in the fall to look at the golden fields being harvested and the brightly coloured autumn leaves on the trees, or through a residential neighborhood in winter to see the Christmas lights on snow-covered houses, the sensation you get from all of these marvelous things is one of pleasure. This kind of beauty is easy on the eyes, it is comforting to look at, and it fills the heart with contentment and gladness.

Suppose however that you are standing at the bottom of Niagara Falls watching the water come rushing down, looking up at the highest peak in a range of mountains, exploring a vast cavern where the stalactites and stalagmites, barely visible in the thin ray of sunlight penetrating the cavern through a small opening in the ceiling of the cave, are larger than yourself, or just gazing up at the moon and stars on a clear night. These sights could hardly be described as “ugly” but they produce in you a very different sensation, one that has little to do with ease or comfort but is more akin to fright. It is a sensation of awe, of being overpowered by that which is vastly, perhaps infinitely, greater than oneself. That which produces sensations of this nature is beyond the beautiful – it is what is called the sublime.

The concept of the sublime is an old one, going back at least to the first century AD when the Greek writer Longinus wrote a short treatise about the sublime as a characteristic of certain kinds of language and literature. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the sublime as we understand it today was placed in contrast with beauty in an essay seeking to explain the difference between the two and why each produces the effects that it does. This essay was A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and its author was Edmund Burke.

Burke is mostly remembered as a statesman today. The son of an Irish lawyer, he was born and educated in Dublin. He abandoned his legal training to pursue a literary career but in the 1760’s became a member of the House of Commons where he gained fame as an orator. As an MP he was a member of the classical liberal Whig party, although he was also a friend of such noted Tories as Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, and part of Dr. Johnson’s circle of literary and intellectual heavyweights, which also included poet/novelist Oliver Goldsmith and painter Joshua Reynolds. He championed his party’s position, and that of the American colonies, in the American Revolution in the 1770’s, but following the 1789 revolution in France, wrote his most famous work Reflections on the Revolution in France. In this book, appalled by the brutality of the French Revolution, he upheld the principles of tradition and order and supported the institutions of the Crown and Church, defending the age of Christianity and chivalry against modern innovation. This espousal of what was essentially the Tory position created a distance between him and his own party but led to his reputation as the “Father of modern conservatism”.

The Sublime and the Beautiful, was written in the years prior to his political career when he sought to establish himself in the world of letters. 1756 was a big year for Burke. He was married that year, that spring saw him published for the first time with a satire entitled A Vindication of Natural Society was published. Later that year The Sublime and Beautiful, which he had written many years previously, also saw print for the first time . He would expand it slightly in the second edition, which included a new preface and an introductory discourse entitled “On Taste”. The second edition came out in either 1757 or 1759 (1). Burke’s essay became very influential in the field of aesthetics, its theme being picked up by a number of thinkers, including Immanuel Kant.

Burke opens his essay by discussing various human emotions and experiences and their external stimuli. He begins with curiosity, our “first and simplest emotion” which is “whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty” and moves on to pleasure and pain, arguing against those like John Locke who understand these in relative terms as the absence of the other. Pleasure and pain are both positive experiences, he maintains, and the condition we are left in when each ceases, is different from the positive experience of the other. All of these passions, he observes, have one of two ends – self-preservation or society. The strongest are those which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The stimuli which work on these are those which threaten pain, danger or death. Up close they are terrifying, but from a distance they can produce a sense of delight. This is the cause of the sublime.

There are other occasions in which we deliberately enter into an experience which reason should tell us will be disagreeable in order to obtain a positive sensation. Take the person who puts extremely hot pepper sauce on his food or talks big in situations where it might provoke a fight. Why does he do so? One possible reason is that that these displays of toughness provide him with a boost to his ego, turning a negative experience into a positive experience of sorts. This is completely different from the experience Burke describes as the sublime. Then there are people who jump off bridges with bungee cords attached to their legs or who go on roller-coaster rides that include sudden steep drops. This is closer to what Burke is talking about because the pleasure one gets from such experiences is directly derived from the terror involved. It is still not quite the same though, for the one is terror experienced but controlled, whereas the other is the terrifying viewed and contemplated from a distance. The one experience is made possible by man’s power and control over that which terrifies him. The other arises out of a revelation of the powerlessness of man in the face of that which is truly great.

The sublime and the beautiful are alike in that they are the subjects of contemplation. The beautiful, however, reaches us through the other set of passions, those which facilitate social intercourse. Of these, Burke sets the passion called love aside for special comment. There is a love which, serves the society of the sexes, which itself serves the end of the reproduction of the species. This love has beauty as its object, for men are attracted to women in general “by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty.” There is also a love which operates in human society in general, although this love is unmixed with sexual desire. It too has beauty as its object.

So far we have only considered what Burke wrote in the first part of his essay. There are five parts in total, the second and third of which are a more extensive look at the sublime and the beautiful respectively, in particular the traits in external stimuli which produce these effects in us. The fourth part tries to explain the mechanics of how these effects are produced within us. A major weakness of this part of the essay is that it is written as if the internal way in which we experience the sublime and beautiful in feelings of love, fear, and awe can be explained as an automatic physical response to such stimuli. The fifth and final part looks at how ideas of the beautiful and the sublime can be generated by words rather than images.

In the second part we are given a more extensive look at the sublime, at the effects it produces in us, and its causes. The chief of these effects, Burke says, is astonishment and he defines astonishment as “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” This definition might strike many of us as being odd. We are used to thinking of astonishment as a sudden arrest of our mental activities but not necessarily because of fear. A synonym for astonish is “startle” however and this still carries the overtones of fear Burke utilizes in his definition. He points out that in many languages the same word is used to mean both “fear” and “wonder” indicating the close relationship between these two senses or feelings.

What sort of things cause the sublime? Burke identifies a number of characteristics which tend to produce the sublime. There is the simple fact of being dangerous, like a poisonous snake, but there is also greatness of strength and power, and vastness of size. Obscurity, such as that caused by the darkness of night, produces fear and therefore the sublime. So, however, do certain kinds of light, such as the light of the sun. Emptiness of various sorts – such as silence and solitude – which Burke calls privations are causes of the sublime, and so is magnificence, such as that of a star-filled sky. Certain colours contribute to the effect of the sublime but others do not so that “in buildings, when the highest degree of the sublime is intended, the materials and ornaments ought neither to be white, nor green, nor yellow, nor blue, nor a pale red, nor violet, nor spotted, but of sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown or deep purple, and the like”.

When he turns his attention to beauty in the next section, Burke has a much longer tradition of interpretation behind him than existed for the sublime. Longinus’s essay had only recently been rediscovered and published and Burke’s immediate antecedent was a series of articles for The Spectator by Joseph Addison (in good classical tradition, Burke only seems to acknowledge Addison when he is disagreeing with him). Beauty, on the other hand, had been a topic of constant discussion and writing for over a millennium. Therefore, much of his discussion of beauty in part three is written negatively, as a refutation of concepts put forward by other people.

It had been suggested, for example, that proportion was a feature which contributes to beauty, and Burke argues that this is not the case for things vegetable, animal, or human. He points out, for example, that the most beautiful things in the vegetable kingdom are flowers, and that proportion can hardly be said to apply to the relationship between their various parts. The swan and the peacock are both considered beautiful birds, but their proportions are both quite unusual for birds and radically different from each other. Burke also challenges the ideas that utilitarian fitness and perfection can be regarded as causes of beauty.

If proportion, fitness, and perfection are not causes of beauty, what does Burke say are?

Things which are beautiful, he says, tend to be small in size – he notes that most languages use the diminutive to express affection. The property of smoothness is “so essential to beauty, that I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth”. Gradual variation in line, he says, is a sign of beauty as opposed to continuous straight lines or sharp angular variation. Mild, clear, colours, such as “light greens; soft blues; weak whites; pink reds; and violets” contribute to beauty, as does clearness and fragility.

It is here that Burke’s analysis of beauty is at its best. His argument against proportion as a cause of beauty is subject to a number of objections. It could be argued that he has only demonstrated that proportion is not essential to beauty, which is not quite the same thing as demonstrating that it does not significantly contribute to it. Then there is the question of the distinction between natural and man-made beauty. Burke rejects the idea, proposed by Vitruvius in the first century BC, and latter held by Leonardo Da Vinci, and, in Burke’s own day by Joseph Addison, that buildings are beautiful because architects have borrowed their proportions from those of human beings. It may be true, as Burke maintains, that this relationship is a myth. It does not follow from that that proportion does not contribute to the beauty of buildings. Proportion is a key element in architecture, not only for the utilitarian reason of structural stability, but for aesthetic purposes as well. A building that reflects well the classical ideals of proportion, harmony, and balance is almost always more pleasing to the eye than a building that does not.

When it comes to the things which Burke asserts are causes of beauty it is harder to object. What emerges, from Burke’s analysis of the causes of the beautiful and the sublime, is that the contrast between these are greater than those between the beautiful and the ugly. While the experience of the beautiful and the sublime are both positive experiences, they are positive experiences of very different kinds. The experience of the beautiful and ugly are the same experience in its positive and negative forms. Burke stresses the difference between our responses to the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful invites us to respond to it with love. The sublime invites the response of being overwhelmed with awe. The sense of danger or threat in the causes of the sublime is what makes the difference, and Burke says that we can never love the sublime.

Is he right in that assertion though?

Consider an interesting question which the strict dichotomy that Burke has drawn raises. Can something be both beautiful and sublime at the same time?

Burke’s description and analysis of the two would seem to suggest the answer “no”.

But what about God?

In the section of Part Two where Burke explains that power is a cause of the sublime there are several paragraphs in which he talks about God’s power as a source of fear:

But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve, in some measure, our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand…When the prophet David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and power which are displayed in the economy of man, he seems to be struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out, Fearfully and wonderfully am I made. (bold here within italics represents italics in original)

Burke, however, was an orthodox Christian. Christ taught that the first and great commandment was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength”. If God is a cause of the sublime – indeed the ultimate cause of the sublime – and the sublime cannot be loved, only revered, how does Burke deal with the Lord’s commandment which he, as a practicing Anglican, would have heard recited at every Holy Communion service as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer?

Burke does not seem to be bothered by this apparent conflict between his theory and his faith. Perhaps it did not occur to him. He does write “Before the Christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the Divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of God”. In context, by “love of God” he means love human beings possess for God rather than God’s love for human beings, but the context also indicates that the purpose of saying this is to further support his argument that God is a cause of fear and the sublime. There is a hint of a partial answer to the dilemma in the sentence, however. If the Christian religion “humanized the idea of the Divinity” it was because the Incarnation is central to Christian revelation – God became man in Jesus Christ. If the great commandment is to love God, it is the Incarnation which makes love for God possible.

That can only be a partial answer, however, for if it were the whole answer it would suggest that God is not beautiful in His divine essence but only as He took human nature upon Himself, a suggestion which would seem to be blasphemous, particularly if we hold with Plato that there is an intimate connection, approaching an identification – between the good and the beautiful. Either Burke has drawn too strict a dichotomy between the sublime and beautiful and has too narrow a concept of love and its causes or God, as the Creator and therefore the ultimate source of both the beautiful and the sublime, must therefore contain both qualities within Himself.

Whichever is the case, the concept of the sublime has become an important part of aesthetic theory, although few today would understand it in quite the same way as Burke did. Burke’s essay is important because it drew our attention to some different facets of the world we live in and the way we experience it, laying a foundation upon which others have built. It displays classical learning and is an excellent example of writing within the British empiricist tradition.

(1) According to the Harvard Classics edition of Burke’s writings in which I read the essay the first edition of The Sublime and Beautiful came out in 1756, the same year as A Vindication of Natural Society. The biographies of Burke that I have consulted, such as John Morley’s (London: Macmillan and Co., 1918) agree with this, although some internet sources date the first edition to 1757. There is more disagreement over the second revised edition. The Harvard Classics edition and many other sources date in to 1757, but others date it to 1759. There is widespread agreement however that Burke had begun writing the essay when a student at Trinity College in Dublin years earlier.